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I had to turn myself into one.
The squadron commanders were working their tails off for not much more money than I was already making; the workload was enormous, there was very little recognition and there was nothing even vaguely cushy about the job. Aside from anything else, being a fighter pilot is dangerous. We were losing at least one close friend every year.
The upshot of all this is that we become competent, which is the most important quality to have if you’re an astronaut—or, frankly, anyone, anywhere, who is striving to succeed at anything at all. Competence means keeping your head in a crisis, sticking with a task even when it seems hopeless, and improvising good solutions to tough problems
In my experience, something similar is true on Earth. Ultimately, I don’t determine whether I arrive at the desired professional destination. Too many variables are out of my control. There’s really just one thing I can control: my attitude during the journey, which is what keeps me feeling steady and stable, and what keeps me headed in the right direction. So I consciously monitor and correct, if necessary, because losing attitude would be far worse than not achieving my goal.
“No one ever accomplished anything great sitting down.”
“Be ready. Work. Hard. Enjoy it!”
Survivor,
So the purpose of the Pavilion Lake Research Project is to try to figure out how they are forming in order to understand more about the origins of life on Earth.
When the stakes are high, preparation is everything. In my day job, the stakes are highest during dynamic operations, when variables change rapidly, triggering chain reactions that unfold in a hurry.
He’s a physician and a commercial pilot and a mountain climber, and I’ve never met anyone who can outwork him: the guy’s mind and body just never stop.
“How can I help us get where we need to go?” You don’t need to be a superhero. Empathy and a sense of humor are often more important, as I was reminded during the most arduous survival training
“When your dad is an astronaut, the most interesting thing about you, growing up, doesn’t have much to do with you, and it’s nothing you control or influence. The fact that your dad is an astronaut trumps everything else people see when they look at you.”
“Big Smoke,”
“If You Could Read My Mind,”
“Beautiful Day”
“World in My Eyes,”
And you have to be competent, and prove to others that you are, before you can be extraordinary. There are no shortcuts, unfortunately.
But the Russian engineers had taped, strapped and sealed our docking module’s hatch just a little too enthusiastically, with multiple layers. So we did the true space-age thing: we broke into Mir using a Swiss Army knife. Never leave the planet without one.
It’s like the last mile of a marathon: the effort has to be more deliberate and you’ve got to push yourself, hard, to keep going right to the very end. It’s tempting to tell yourself, “I’ve only got 20 steps left,” but if you start anticipating the finish line, chances are that you’ll let up and then you could make mistakes—ones that could be fatal in my line of work.
Still, I also know that most people, including me, tend to applaud the wrong things: the showy, dramatic record-setting sprint rather than the years of dogged preparation or the unwavering grace displayed during a string of losses.
